Harpooned was featured in a segment on ABC2’s show ‘Good Game’. You can watch the clip below…

Harpooned is reviewed in the latest issue of Retro Gamer CD magazine.

“It’s by equal measure sad, fun and an absolutely commendable way to make an important political point. Score - 81%”

You can download the magazine here.

Harpooned has been updated with lots of new features and is now available for the Mac as well as Windows.

View the trailer:

Harpooned 2009 update from Conor O’Kane on Vimeo.

Read more for the complete press release…

Read the rest of this entry »

Game Developer Magazine’s August 2008 issue has an article entitled - “Top Ten Indie Freeware Titles 2008: The best so Far” and one of their top 10 is Harpooned.

You can buy game developer magazine on their website here.

Winda Benedeti at MSNBC, in her article on controversial games writes about Harpooned…

While it’s both gross and sad, O’Kane said he wanted to use satire to illuminate a real-world problem – the mass slaughter of whales by the Japanese under the guise of “research.”

Read the article here, and the page about Harpooned is here.

Harpooned was featured in Games for Windows Magazine.

Harpooned is also in this month’s PC PowerPlay (Australia).

“Most of us are a bit miffed about the whole whaling debacle, so Conor O’Kane created a game to express what he and I’m sure many others feel towards it. The result is an addictive arcade shooter with a biting satirical edge, where players must “research” whales while avoiding the media and Greenpeace. Species Combo!”

Want to know what sort of research the Japanese scientists are doing with all those dead whales? How about attempting to create cow/whale mutant hybrids! Imagine the size of the steaks you’d get from one of those!

Click here to read the abstract of the paper on the “Fertilisability of ovine, bovine or minke whale spermatozoa injected into bovine oocytes” written by Hong Wei and Yutaka Fukui of the Laboratory of Animal Genetics and Reproduction, Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Obihiro, Japan

The conclusion of the experiment: “Blastocyst formation was only observed when bull spermatozoa were used.” Unfortunately they failed to create any viable cow/whale mutant hybrids. I wonder if they’d eat grass or krill?

Thanks to Steve Jackson for the link.

I’ve written a short article on the making of Harpooned, which you can read at GameSetWatch and Gamasutra

Click here to read the article.

Tim Norton writes:

“Bringing together previous discussions here about whaling and computer gaming, have a look at Harpooned.
My personal favourite is the inclusion of protest boats & helicopters - you are instructed not to hurt them, to avoid unwanted legal fees.”

Read the entire post here.